Panoramas & Holidays

A few years ago I found a great site Breaking the Gigapixel Barrier about creating Giga-Pixel photos by stitching 100s of normal SLR photos together. Some people have pushed this even further with a 13 Gigapixel photo of Harlem with over 2000 photos. So my Christmas present from my wife was a new tripod and indexing head so I can take photos every 5 degrees. As my wife and I went to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon over the holidays it was a great opportunity to try to take my first Gigapixel photo. My wife has written a blog with entertaining tales of our travels fionapotts.com. Well I did not break the Giga-Pixel barrier I managed to get to 733Mpix.

Its 127 12Mpix images stitched together in 3 rows every 5 degrees using a 300mm zoom lens. After some research and experimenting with different software for joining all the photos the best I found was Autopano Pro which rocks at auto detecting matching points in each photo and stitching and blending all the photos together. You can check out my results and other photos from our trip on my updated Photos Page. I took about 10 panoramas of the Grand Canyon including some HDR (High Dynamic Range) ones with 3 bracketed exposures per photo. Autopano Pro has support for stitching HDR panos but I did not have much luck as the was clear banding from photo to photo. If any of you have any tips on how to stitch HDR panos I would love to here. Well its been a fun break, back to fixing the last pre-beta Nimbus bugs tomorrow.